Real-life 8-bit Art

8-bit cannon and redcoat

8-bit cannon and redcoat

I’m just sitting down to catch up on the 20 stars of visual assignments and the 10 stars of design assignments I have to do by Sunday. The first week of is always a tour-de-force, and I’m just getting settled a bit with the setup, the feeds, the syndication bus, etc. But it was easier than ever this time around thanks to the seemingly boundless support and genius of Tim Owens. This class is firing on all cylinders! Less than three days to get 26 students up and running with their own domains, not to mention blogging, tweeting, tagging, and wrapping their head around the distributed syndication bus—that’s pretty amazing when you think about it, but it’s becoming par for the course when it comes to . This course rocks!

Anyway, I’ve been carrying a camera around to make sure I do the Daily Creates (no cellphone for me, so I need to go out of my way to create, unlike all you lazy ass smart phoners 😉 ) and it just so happens I was at the multicultural night at my son’s elementary school.  The table my family set up about Italy (forza Italia!) was in front of a huge, rather cool mosaic of the Revolutionary War history of Fredericksburg. I took my camera out and started snapping some shots, only to realize just how much this “real-life” art has in common with the popular 8-bit art of the digital world. So not only did I take some fun pictures in the “real-world,” but I created a new visual assignment called “Real-life 8-bit Art.” The description is as follows:

8-bit art is all the rage right now, and what is so compelling about it is that it’s all around us. Find or create 8-bit art in your real-world environment and photograph it so that you can share it here and actually get credit! Free yourself of the prison that is your computer, find 8-bit art in nature and release your inner-hippie.

I like that the assignment is open ended, take a picture or use something in nature (or your house, etc.) to create 8-bit art in the ral-world. Now some of you might be saying, “Hey, WTF?” How can you just take images of a stupid mosaic and call it an assignment?’ Well, I can do it because this is , and you can do it too, dammit. Let’s go, stop feeding of the masses, and create something already.

Anyway, here are my images from the mosaic, I really kinda love them 😉

8-bit Horse

8-bit Horse

Tetris

Tetris

8-bit Brit

8-bit Brit

8-bit George Washington

8-bit George Washington

8-bit colonial house

8-bit colonial house

8-bit Hugh Mercer

8-bit Hugh Mercer

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6 Responses to Real-life 8-bit Art

  1. Stefanie says:

    I’ve often thought about this and made some pixel art from traditional handicraft patterns. Still, your treasure shown above is particularly beautiful, which just means I like it.

  2. Yeah. Mosaics back in the day had to quantize their images to the available colours, and the artists had to reduce reality into something that gave a pixellated representation of life. I’ll never forget the mosaics I saw at St. Peter’s at the Vatican. They were full-bore thousands-of-colours bit art — despite being done centuries before our computers were developed. Yeah, and they built stuff way UP high, back then, too.

    I’ll have to keep my eye out for mosaics now. And perhaps there are some other bit-limited representations of reality that folks can capture for this assignment, too. Eyes open, everyone!

  3. Jessica Ledford says:

    Lol to your comment about us “lazy ass smart phoners1”. I am defiantly under that category and I am cool with it! I love my iPhone! #teamiphone all the way baby!
    Anyways, I loved this idea!! So creative! Its really cute and I love everything that you created! This is such a cute assignment! Lets get crafty much?!

  4. Reverend says:

    @Stefanie,
    Thank you, I am going to try and design some real-life 8-bit art with pasta this weekend to see if Ican;t work on something with my kids for #ds106. Might be fun 🙂

    @Andrew,
    Hail to your awesome. Have I told you how amazing you ar yet today with all you mind boggling work over the last three months. The Kill, Baby…Kill gifs were nothing short of magic. Not to mention all your #ds106zone genius, I can’t keep up! All this to say, how on earth can you still find time to comment given your out put right now? I am genuflecting as I write this 😉
    As for St Peter’s that would be a treasure trove for this assignment, I found this crzy mosaic in a small elementary school in Fredericskburg, Italy would be a year long book project, and if my family and I make it back there this year, I just might “write” that book!

    @Jessica,
    You ar ethe first #ds106zone UMW student to comment on the bava, which means you are better than the rest 🙂 And, fwiw, don;t be a lazy ass iphoner, you are better than that, you have commented on the bava, you deserve more 🙂

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  6. Jessica Ledford says:

    HAHA!! I found out what it means!! haha it like you know me! lol! Your using some advanced text talk for me! Shows I need to keep up with this!

    You basically said I’m awesome hehehe :):) Wont let this down! lol!

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